My heart goes out to those affected by the wildfires in the land of OZ. I know that the people of Australia will make it through this disaster, and hopefully in the future, they will elect leaders who will deal with the issues that made it worse than it should have been. (Aussies, when you read the prognostications of economists supporting the politicians, make sure that you know what "externalities" are. And realize that only (dreaded) government regulations will include provisions to cover the costs of externalities that can negatively affect the lives of millions.
It is difficult to avoid controversial discussions about fire and climate science, or the evidence for the root causes behind current trends in wildfires, but informed, educated people know that "yet another disaster has been made worse by climate change." When such disasters are over, it is critical to deal with issues that likely made it worse than it should have been, and attempt to reduce the impact of similar future disasters.
I am now an old man, and live in a small town in a beautiful rain-forest valley with little concern for wildfires. But I watch as people around the world resist the "inconveniences" that adapting to a more sustainable and safe (for humans) world necessitate. For the younger readers of this post, I hope that you will rally, respect the science, and reject the selfish interests of the rich and powerful who want to continue to exploit nature at great cost to many people. Science-based planning is not perfect, but it remains the best tool available to keep the earth a good place for humans to live.
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My background and interest in "fire ecology":
I have been one step away from losing possessions to two horrific urban wildfires. A house I rented for a year in 1977 was located above Lake Temescal in the hills of Oakland, California. Only one house on that street was left standing after the 1991 Oakland firestorm, which destroyed more than 3,200 homes. The house that I had rented previously burned to the ground. I had friends who lost their homes in that conflagration.
Years later, just over two years ago, the October, 2017 Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa, California, 12 miles from my former home in Sebastopol, Sonoma County, destroyed more than 5,600 structures - mostly homes and businesses. After six years of living in Panama as a retired expatriate, I had returned to Sonoma County six months earlier to retrieve the last of my possessions and take them back to Panama. The friend's house - and the garage where my books and photos had been stored for several years - burned to the ground in the Tubbs fire.
I understand wildfires quite well, and my interest in the subject was part of the motivation for returning to college to study ecology and conservation and graduating with a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976.
The study of fire-maintained ecosystems like Australia and California was an integral part of an upper-division course I took at Berkeley while pursuing a B.S. degree in Conservation of Natural Resources. Much of the course's material was based on the work of then Professor Emeritus Harold Biswell, a pioneer of ecology-oriented wildfire science, and was taught by one of his colleagues. The very ecosystems in some regions of Australia, California and elsewhere around the world have evolved to thrive with periodic burning.
One of the subjects we studied in that ecology course, and also in another course entitled "The Sociology of Natural Resources," was "human to nature relationships" which is closely associated with "environmental ethics". A specific study that we examined was the relationship - and reactions to - bush fires in Australia. We humans have a strong ability to recover from such disasters, and then go back and rebuild as if the fire was not a naturally recurring phenomenon. And the same disaster would repeat twenty or thirty years later.
Unfortunately, the suppression of wildfires often leads to bigger and more destructive wildfires, but just like regulations for automobiles and their emissions, humans resist restrictions on their "freedom" and desires to build and live how and wherever they desire. With the current trend of climate change around the world, including more extreme weather (hotter, colder, wetter, dryer), wildfires in many places are becoming more and more destructive and/or frequent, and in many places, the ecosystems are not returning to their former composition. (The dry pinyon pine forests of the southwest USA as well as other types of forests in the western U.S. are good examples of that trend.)
